584: (Solo) What 90 Days of Daily Posting Taught Me About Personal Branding

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0:39Just head to omnisend.com forward slash founder without the E to get started. All right, now let's jump back into the show. Hey guys, Nathan here. Welcome back to another founder to founder episode. Now these are quick solo episodes where I share lessons that I've learned from interviewing some of the greatest entrepreneurs of our generation, building founder. And today I want to talk about something really simple, but this is super powerful. And that is this idea of posting consistently online and growing a personal brand. I want to share what I've learned from recently committing to posting 90 days straight.

1:18This is something that every single founder should take very, very, very seriously, because what I'm about to share with you has been game-changing. Hear the stories, learn the proven methods, and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Founder Podcast with Nathan Chan.

1:39I've been building Founder for about 12 years now, and if I'm going to be honest with you, it took me a while to build confidence. Like, to build confidence in myself, like Founder's my first business, and, you know, I built another business, Healthish. It was an e-commerce brand that I exited a few years ago. and I didn't feel worthy. I didn't feel like, you know, founder's my first business. I was a guy that was talking about entrepreneurship and I'd never built a business so that I had to build Healthish. Now I built Founder and launched all sorts of other products and I was like, you know what?

2:10I can see this personal brand thing is something. It's something that everyone is doing and I was like at the start of this year, I am not going to post like Nathan content through Founder. I'm just going to build Nathan Chan. So I started posting on LinkedIn. I started posting on Instagram and I've always known content matters. We teach it at Founder. We see our students grow using their personal brands and I want to do it for myself again, like no team, no polish, just me showing up daily. And it wasn't about going viral, it was about building trust and building a relationship with you guys and sharing my life with you guys and what I'm learning.

2:46And here's what I learned. First and foremost, consistency beat strategy. You don't need to have the perfect content plan. you just need to show up and people start to expect you they trust you and they remember you and you get better at the content like when i first started in my 90 day focus of just posting every single day and going no days lost of posting every single day what happens is you just start to get better and you remove this kind of fear like believe it or not i had a lot of fear and that's why it took me so long like i should have been doing all the stuff that i'm doing now with my personal brand and posting content consistently online 10 years ago.

3:24If I had of, I dare say, the founder would be 10 times bigger, which is kind of crazy. So here's the thing. People start to trust you more and you can build a relationship with your community at a much deeper level. And that's why people are doing it. That's why there's this mad rush right now. And I can see it myself. And I'm telling you guys, you need to be doing it. So that's the first thing. Consistency matters. The second thing is your personal brand drives business growth. Every single one of my posts led to more DMs from founders, more reach for our products and services and more people discovering founder for the first time.

4:03And it's been absolutely crazy. I've grown maybe 15 ,000 followers in the past six months. They're like not crazy growth, right? and I'm not even trying to distract the founder team too much, but now we're all saying like, okay, we need to do both founder and Nathan. So we're starting to get into it more. But the truth is people buy from people, not just brands. And when you build your personal brand, you build authority, build trust, you build a direct line to your ideal audience. And the craziest stuff happens, right? Like I speak to you guys every day now. It's amazing. And I even got like some feedback from a sales call literally this morning that somebody had.

4:39And like, I'm jumping on the phone with that person. I'm going to find out exactly what happened because somebody was interested in one of our programs and I don't know, they just didn't get the best experience. Like I'm speaking to you guys. I'm finding out how we can better serve you. I'm hearing like what guests you want to hear from more. I'm hearing about your experience with Founder Plus or our coaching program. It is incredible. So that's the second thing. The third thing is you get clearer by creating. I didn't always know what to post, believe it or not. But when When I started posting daily, what it allowed me to do was have clarity on what I actually believe, what I care about, what's worth sharing, what you guys care about.

5:15And then that content we can use in other areas of the business. Hey, I'll let you know a little secret. Some of these episodes and the topics are things that I've seen work on my personal brand, right? That I'm posting. So content creation really forced me to just sharpen my message. and that's invariable as a founder. And something else that's been really, really crazy too is now that I'm building my personal brand and I'm putting out content consistently, I'm networking more than ever. Like the doors that I'm opening, it is crazy. Like why wasn't I doing this soon? If we need team members, I'm posting on social and there's just incredibly talented people that follow me, that follow the founder brand.

5:55We don't even need to run ads on like a job site. Like we're hiring people through me organically posting. It's so cool. and something I wish I had done sooner. But at first, as I shared with you, like I was super nervous. I was super intimidated. I didn't feel worthy. Even though I put myself out there, a founder, I wanted everything to be polished. I was worried about saying the wrong thing. I was worried about people judging me. But the best thing I did was just make this commitment, this 90-day focus. Someone else I connected with, Dane Walker, he's got an amazing brand and I connected with him.

6:26He wrote this book, 90-Day Personal Brand, and I just sprinted on 90 days. It was amazing. I connected with Dane through that. But at the end of the day, once I started posting, I realized that nobody really cares about perfection. All they care about is value and the stories you tell and showing up authentically. And that's what builds a connection. And that's really what business is, building relationships at scale. So if you're building your business right now, or even if you haven't launched your business, I highly encourage you, if you can and if you feel comfortable, put yourself out there.

6:57Your personal brand is one of your biggest unfair advantages. and you look at Amy Smile from The Odd Muse, incredible example how she's built that company faster than any other fashion brand in her space. Doing this, it builds trust super fast than any ad. It gives you leverage across every single product, service that you launch and it future-proofs your career as well, even if you pivot. You don't need millions of followers either. You just need to show up consistently with something to say. and more and more i'm seeing this trend across super successful founders we're interviewing they're doing founder-led content they're building in public and they're building their personal brand so guys start posting remember to stay consistent don't make it perfect and know that this is an insanely unfair advantage to build your business it depends on it but even if you're not sure what to say just start anyway you'll figure it out but make that commitment 90 day focus and guys if you want more help learning how to build your personal brand grow your audience monetize your content build in public we have incredible programs in the founder plus platform to guide you through it just go to founder.com forward slash membership and you get a one dollar trial and you can enroll in rory vaden's course on how to build and grow and monetize your personal brand is an incredible program it is amazing it's one of my favorites anyways thanks for tuning in as always would love to hear from you dm me at nathan chan on instagram would love to hear from you if you're enjoying these episodes love to hear your feedback and i'll see you in the next one thanks guys